WildX wrote: ↑29 May 2019, 11:13I'm going to try and answer all of your questions.
I appreciate honest answer, thank you.
The fusion is between the world of The Mana World (continent of Ancea with the locations from the game like Hurnscald etc.) and the world of Evol Online (continent of Aemil with Artis etc.); I disagee that it's a vague use of these words, there have been many very clear explanations of this, including the big link at the top of the forum board called "TMW-Evol Fusion" with almost 1000 redirects to a page that explains everything in detail.
Speaking for myself, I think project name like this calls for retaining some look&feel of TMW and things that could be considered "legacy" of TMW. After visiting test server... it felt like entirely different game: can't find any familiar corner/item/npc, etc.
As for redirects/links/etc:
1) Some links are stale or backfire. Say, Etherpad shows big warning it on deathbead (no shutdown date though). I hope you have backup of what it contains, Etherpad itself suggests it.
2) Link to development roadmap leads to ... page with login request. Guess it gitlab's quirk? Makes link almost pointless: devs already know that, everyone else faces unwelcoming login page.
Yes and yes. Viable gameplay is the main focus and one of the major benefits of moving to a brand new server. Starting from zero with gameplay and level progression will allow us to measure out a balanced and fun "journey to max level" for all characters.
Whoa, I would assume I missed a lot of things, despite of lurking on test server. Looking into git seems it got more items than test server exposes. Speaking of TMW, I think ppl level way too fast. I'm 100% fine with leveling again to see how it performs. As for economy, I would call it quite stable for consumables in TMW. That's the most active daily part of economy. As for equipment, it rather "deflation" since under such system more items are introduced one way or another, price per item in player trade expected go down, as it getting more abdunant (unless player population increases at comparable pace). On its own it hard to do something sane about without weird ad-hoc hacks. For economy it causes deflation as one could buy more for same amount of money.
On second thought I think I could be ok with different economy IF that worth of it. For example "item breakage" could be interesting option, but it changes a lot of things and does not maps 1:1 to TMW, turning equipment into "special" consumables. Yet this solves deflation problem without "hacks" and could give boost to crafting/vending,hunting/mining, dangerous expeditions & boss fights. This is in very basic state in TMW and it partially attributed to its economy. So I think there is certain point, if you dare to try something like this.
The test server is for testing, some of these things either don't need testing or aren't ready for testing yet; if all of them were dumped on the test server at once we'd simply be releasing an unfinished version of the actual Hercules server. A game in development doesn't show off all of its new content before launch, it tends to spoil the surprise.
Interesting thinking, I like idea about surprise. On other hand test server doesn't fullfills it role and it causes confusion (I thought test server meant to give more or less actual state). "Real programmers test in production"?
As for trashing TMW art, I can tell you that at least myself and Micksha (who's in charge of art) are very focused on maintaining the "TMW feel" as we're both nostalgic TMW players who want to see classic beloved items, NPCs, places, etc. return in the new server. Some things (especially maps) will get some touch-ups or remakes if we think we can do better than what already exists, but at the end of the day we're trying to re-create everything that currently exists in TMW because it's a new server, not a new game.
I really like this view - that could be best option for both devs and players in long run. If it turns to be workable.
You can mistrust new developers because of the actions of old developers. Platyna does it all the time.
Platyna is not bad at spotting patterns. But utterly bad at using obtained knowledge, especially when it comes to "self diagnostics". Later tends to make it hilarious.
I think it's counterproductive to be hostile to anyone trying to take this project forward simply because some people years ago did things you didn't like. o11c hasn't been around for years and he left because his approach was not acceptable by the standards of most of his dev colleagues. I think all of the current devs are smart enough to not repeat the same mistakes.
I really hope it is a case and in this case I should tell I'm sorry for false assumptions. Those were based on visiting test server and assuming it more or less up to date, but it seems it wasn't really a case. At the end of day pointless hostility is stupid, platyna-like attitude is not something to be proud of.
I completely disagree here. The current TMW economy has been broken by years of bug exploits that created very high inflation, bad item management by old dev teams that would give out items to players by spawning them with commands rather than creating quests and actual game content for them and poor planning of quest rewards through uncoordinated production of content.
While these corner cases are true, it actually causes least effect on "day to day" gameplay, etc. So on its own I do not view it as major problem. But I think you raised valid point that over time equipment items could tend to accumulate, dropping their prices and it isn't easy to do something about it in TMW-style economy.
Starting from zero with the economy is the only way to fix these issues. There will surely be things to iron out in the future, but this time we can keep track of every problem as it comes instead of letting it sit for years and slowly make money meaningless in the game.
If it have to come to this, I would think it decent chance to introduce item breakage and crafting of equipment, etc. At whatever later point it could be absolute pain that is hard to undertake.
Evol sprites use the sitting position from current TMW sprites when sitting in beds and chairs. If they look odd, it's because the "original" sitting position was a bit odd-looking. Reid invented the Evol sitting position for that reason and decided to keep the old one as a secondary sitting position for beds and chairs to add a little flavour and life to the characters. It is exactly as you say, a little feature to spice up gameplay. I don't understand what you don't like about it.
Oh wow, it rather complicated. I can imagine it got something to do with position of player legs vs chair/bed/etc. Though most objections are easier - totally unusable/unsleepable chairs/beds almost everywhere. Gets a bit odd in, say, ship where some sailor lies in something like hammoc - but no way player can do anything comparable.
I'd be surprised if the test server looked like "usual Evol" to anyone since we've been focusing on TMW-specific content for the past year. You may have been spawned on an older map. Have you seen the Hurnscald and Argaes areas? Items, as I mentioned above, are not all on the test server. You can use /createitems to see which ones are available and you can test any of those out.
1) I've been curious to see how items/gameplay evolved. And found nearly no change vs plain evol, even after trying debug features, etc. But accoring to you and after lurking in git it seems I had outdated view and "missed something" is quite the case.
2) I've been in Hurns. And got idea I like TMW hurns better. I think I already been too hostile, so it would take me some thinking on how to write feedback in way that does not sounds hostile/arrogant/demotivating.
3) Argaes... no, I wasn't there, mostly because map naming changed, most straightforward "anchors" failed. At which point one gets somewhat lost without thorough grinding through git.
TMW can die just like anything else. There's no 100% sure way to prevent TMW from being abandoned forever. The best way to me is to continue to grow this world, add new content and provide a full game to the community. The only way to do this is to move away from the old tmwAthena server which is not only buggy and unstable, but as I've been saying it's also horribly unbalanced in many ways from years of uncoordinated development. I'm very hopeful that TMW will be a success. I think it has a special place in gaming as a timeless old-school MMORPG that also benefits from the Open Source world. I'm making a point of answering all of your questions in detail because if I can't convince you that our development plans are good, at least I can show you that we all personally care about TMW and that's the only reason we're here working on it.
Yes, you managed to persuade me, thanks.
The biggest challenge for TMW is not being able to follow through with one plan for long enough because everybody start disagreeing on what to do. I've been focusing on keeping us on a single path and it's been going great. We're ahead of schedule with development for the first time in years and we have a team capable of delivering the game of our dreams. The biggest obstacle right now, frankly, is people who push against us without giving us a chance. If people got involved with development by submitting ideas and trying to learn how to make stuff (see Dev Academy) we'd have even better chances at success.
Ok, that's a point of view I failed to consider. Though devs do the very same to community on regular basis. I bet this state of things can be improved hell a lot. After all we all like TMW. And Evol, too.
When it comes to DevAcademy & so on...
1) Lack of test server with up to date state makes it challenging to get overall idea what it meant to be, how it performs, what are most pressing issues when it comes to making gameplay viable, etc.
2) As I can see still plenty activity happens behind closed doors, with plenty of things hidden in sleeves. So "tuning in" is "difficult" as best. For example, are there simple example on how to get e.g. local test server giving more up to date feeling of overall project state, gameplay and so on, to get idea how good/bad some ideas map into it, etc?
3) One of problems with throwing cool thing out of sleeve in one shot, it could be late for some kinds of feedback. As abstract example, introducing something like e.g. item breakage on live server with establisjed economy ... looks in between of "hellish challenge" and "total annihilation".
The discussion will continue, especially over the next 3 months. Anything that can be migrated without disrupting the new server's economy and gameplay balance will be migrated. Step one to achieve that is account-bound items.
So it seems it was really false assumption, sorry about that.